pintail21

I'm confused. Are they the 1% or are they lowly minimum wage servants? I think you've completely forget that athletes have always been outspoken and played major roles in conversation about racial discrimination in our society. Jackie Robinson said he wouldn't sing the anthem or salute the flag because of the racism he faced in society. Jessie Owens wasn't outspoken publicly but he certainly contributed to the debate. Tommie Smith and the other black sprinter made the black power fist on the olympics to raise awareness about oppression. Mohammed Ali wouldn't go fight for America because a Vietnamese soldier never called him the n word. Pay attention, this has happened for decades. I bet you would love for them to shut up, but probably like to hear Ted Nugent's latest opinions on foreign policy on fox news each week, because he's more qualified than a Stanford educated athlete. Just say you don't agree with their views instead of taking the cowardly way out and refusing to even discuss the problem at it's merits. Athletes are raising awareness that unarmed black citizens, who are legally presumed innocent, are executed by police at a rate 2.5 times more frequently than white men. Why are you so scared to discuss that issue? Why are you saying that kneeling is more disrespectful than some guy who wants to use that precious symbol to decorate his sleeveless tap out shirt?

There is a far greater than 0% chance that the guy maniacally laughing about crashing 50,000+ lbs of metal and Jet-A decides to turn towards the major metro area what, 3 nm miles away and go out in a bigger bang of glory. Then what? The hostile aircraft is orbiting over the water, ******* do something! What’s next? “Yeah the bears were over the lower 48, but their bomb bay doors weren’t open yet”? Hostile aircraft flying over water, shoot it down, end of story. If you can’t shoot down a stolen, erratically flown aircraft within 2 mins of killing thousands of civilians then save tax payer money and cancel the entire homeland defense mission! What a joke.

It's another nail in the coffin for single pilot or single remote pilot ops, that's for sure.

So what exactly is the point of having billions of dollars worth of fighters, fuel and weapons on alert around the country when an airliner gets hijacked next to a city of 4 million people, the mentally disturbed pilot is doing aerobatics over the water, and you just have the 15's hang back and log a 1.0 dissimilar formation sortie? Someone at NORTHCOM should be getting fired over this.

News is reporting 5 were on board, 2 confirmed dead with the others status unknown. It looks like they came down on a warehouse of some sort too, so hopefully the people in the building got out as well.

Was there anything new in the presentation? Everything I've seen in open source reporting is we already knew this information, whether Iran admitted to it or not, and this was all prior to the agreement. Since then they are meeting every requirement in the deal. So use the size 3500 font and simple 3 word sentences (gee I wonder who they are writing that for) all you want, it doesn't add anything significant to the discussion.

They couldn't come to an agreement due to money and Kaeppernick was also rumored to be holding out for a team he could sign with and compete for a starting job. Seattle hardly has any cap space left and has higher spending priorities elsewhere, although we will need a replacement for Wilson by week 4 at this rate and I think he'll be the first one we call if/when Wilson gets hurt. Kappernick's career PER easily puts him in top 15 qb's this year, even his worst season's QBR makes him better than 10 current starters. It's pathetic that a quiet protest with no impact on the game gets more negative attention than domestic abusers, dog fighters and accused murderers, much less the thousands of fans at the game that also ignore the proper national anthem etiquette.

Is this ironic? I'm pretty sure this is ironic. That one aged well. Nothing like a good ole fashioned tax cut promise, followed by a promise to massively increase military spending in order to support a more isolationist national defense strategy. A letter to our very foolish leader...

Sounds to me like those snowflakes at fox news needs to retreat to their safe spaces so big mean people like Colin Kaepernick can't hurt their precious feelings.

Kaeppernick is an idiot and exhibit A of why the BLM is doomed to fail just like the Occupy Wall Street movement fizzled out. You need an organizational structure and a charismatic leader who can be the focal point of the cause. If you have random idiots claiming to speak for the organization sending white people to the back of the protest or have a QB protesting then refusing to vote or engage the public/lawmakers in a meaningful way the entire organization loses any shred of credibility. The media will look for what plays best and of course the idiots come out of the woodwork with no coherent theme, strategy or media experience and it get ugly. If the NFL wants to bring viewer numbers back they need to cut down on the tv breaks. Driving down the field and call a timeout? Commercial break. 2 minute warning? Commercial break. Score a touchdown and it gets reviewed? Take a break. Kick the extra point? Take a break. After the kickoff? Take a break. It's insane and borderline criminal for any poor bastard watching the game on AFN. Thats why I loved watching soccer at the deid, no commercial breaks means less stupid commercials about the code of conduct or what the PA folks at Rammstein are doing this week. The arbitrary suspensions and horrible officiating doesn't help either. If viewer num bers held during a murderer, a rapist and a dog fighter taking the field I don't think enough people care about 2-3 players not standing. Hell thousands of fans in the same stadium won't even take their hat off during the national anthem and nobody says anything about them.

I wonder how great this Air Force could be if some of those "company men" were replaced by the "cool, popular crowd" who are widely regarded as the best pilots and leaders in the squadron, and not the people who turn down deployments and flights to check the boxes to get a school slot? The sooner you realize the core values aren't about indentured servitude and you start treating people like you actually care about their well being, then the sooner the RPA manning disaster will be fixed. Or you can walk around an Ops squadron handing out 341's for shitty attitude and keep marveling at how anyone could possibly want to leave as you give them their stop loss paperwork.

For you new co's/lt's out there this is a great learning opportunity about when to bite your tongue, take good feedback from far more experienced dudes and seizing the opportunity to stfu before you dig yourself a deeper hole. I would love to see our buddy Scotch here handles a debrief. I sincerely feel bad for those poor souls in rpa's if this is the "help" they're going to get. Forget leadership 101, how about social skills 101? Not everybody has the same goals and desires that you do, you won't ever change them, so figure out a way to talk to them like a person and just maybe they'll be willing to work with you and help you out.

Here's an idea, instead of building an entirely new rank structure and providing less training and less pay for the same responsibility in the jet, why don't we bring in more airmen and GS-4's to do the office work that is driving said pilots away and removing their focus on flying, and stick with a system that's been working fine for the last 60 years? Pilots will *gasp* get to focus on flying and being better, smarter pilots. Congressmen get more jobs in their district. Big blue gets squadrons with tons of experience and less turnover, giving them better combat capability and allowing us to focus on getting better products out of UPT and trimming it down, eliminating possibly 1-2 UPT bases and returning all those white jet slots to the MAJCOMs to give us even better manning.

People carrying guns and drugs across the border then returning aren't immigrants, they're smugglers.

If the ISS falls out of the sky tomorrow the Taliban would try to take credit for it. I also don't know where he would have learned bomb making, or why the Taliban would need an outsider to teach them bomb making when they were pretty skilled with IED's after fighting us for 8+ years so it's pretty obvious that those claims are just propaganda.

Do you think we adequately dealt with every Nazi or Japanese soldier? You can't look someone up forever for simply being associated with the wrong group. There's plenty of evidence that a lot of these recruits were mislead and outright lied to and want to come back home. That's an intel gold mine, why wouldn't we want in on it? Give them an out and remove the enemy from the battlefield and weaken ISIS through every means possible. If there's anything the recent leaks have told us is these guys are going to be tracked for a long time by a number and if they want to try to be a sleeper cell then the best thing they can do for us is come back and try to link up with their buds.

Hey now, give Dear Leader some credit! http://abcnews.go.com/International/watch-kim-jong-pilot-plane/story?id=27926088 And the Jordanian government is denying that the king flew any combat sorties. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rumors-of-king-abdullah-flying-in-airstrikes-not-true-fox-excited-anyway/

Talk to your SERE folks and they will have dozens of examples of it working in real life. If you were thrown in jail, flown halfway around the world and held indefinitely with no charge, legal rights and you were tortured wouldn't you be a little bit resentful towards the western world? There are plenty of examples of normal people or criminals being converted to islamic extremism in jail and it is understandable that a government would be cautious about that. If your senator or congressman went to the feds and sought to resettle gitmo detainees in your district do you think they'll be reelected? It's a classic "not in my backyard" example. What intel did it ignore? Do you have an open or high side source on that? I've seen a lot of the talking heads mention that but with no proof or supporting information.

And said hypothetical terrorist says he put it in the Staples Center when it's actually in the Rose Bowl, or it really that person wasn't on the terrorist varsity squad and when he realizes the only way to end the pain and suffering is to say anything and he spits out the first location he can belieably speak about, and in either case it sends valuable resources going miles in the wrong direction wasting even more precious time. I'm not sure how familiar you are with fallacies, but here's a wikipedia page for the straw man argument that interestingly enough includes the following line that is oddly prescient "This technique has been used throughout history in polemical debate, particularly in arguments about highly charged emotional issues where a fiery, entertaining "battle" and the defeat of an "enemy" may be more valued than critical thinking or understanding both sides of the issue." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man But that straw man example is not the real situation at Gitmo, which is taking someone who may or may not know information that may or may not still be current, accurate and relevant and you intimidate them and inflict pain and suffering until they say what we want to hear. Then we send a team of who knows how many intel types to go chase down the story and see if it checks out, wasting time and money in the process. Do you realize that US citizens who are not under any physical stress resembling torture falsely confess thousands of times a year? 30% of the convicted "criminals" who were exonerated due to DNA testing made a confession, incriminating statement or pled guilty and keep in mind that's with the knowledge that they had the US justice system on their side. So I wonder what the rate is with people who are extraordinarily rendered, tortured and whisked off to black sites and left in a extralegal status indefinitely. It's safe to say that 95% of the people on this site went to SERE and they all saw first hand how telling white lies, half truths and information which only sounded right could save your bacon, give up nothing and waste enemy resources on wild goose chases. One day we'll realize that we can't beat terrorists by taking one off the battlefield and helping to create two in their place. Sadly the interrogation gurus probably created more terrorists than they locked up.

So should we do the same thing with AIDS? I mean that has an equal chance of mutating and finding a natural reservoir in the Western Hemisphere right (as in pretty much zero).

The "experts" who got sick in africa weren't wearing their biohazard suits because it was too hot, and the "experts" in the US were nurses who had no experience dealing with biosafety level 4 agents. If you don't follow african funeral rites and don't give hands on medical care to ebola patients there is zero chance of getting sick. Statistically speaking more americans have been killed by toasters, cows and elevators than ebola this year, hell the common cold has probably offed over 3000 americans this year but nobody bats an eye at that.

So you're saying that going to Altus while still having Honolulu, Seattle, Charleston, Anchorage, (or Mildenhall, Scott, Wichita, Spokane, etc) on the horizon is comparable to hoping you can leave for Clovis, NM, Whiteman, MO, or Creech?

There are friction points, but the author doesn't even address the economic concerns. The United States is responsible for about 30% of China's GDP. Do you honestly think they'll throw that (and any semblance of relations between them and any other SEA nation) away for a couple uninhabitable islands? China owns a ton of our debt and if the dollar's value crashes that harms them as well. Furthermore China has no desire to be the world's #1 superpower. How often do you see them stepping in for humanitarian aid, joint patrols, etc? They have a pretty sweet gig riding our coattails and being #2 or #3. It's fun to play imaginary war games and no doubt it does wonders for Lockheed's stock, but there's no way China gets froggy and plays with mutually assured destruction.

The military perspective: the AP can do many things better than you, like stay on speed on altitude at cruise for 5 hours, but the second it goes batshit crazy, fire George and hand fly the damn thing. I've been through commercial training programs and they are appalled when you try to hand fly. They want you to fix problems with the autopilot by changing modes, etc. It's gear up, flaps up AP on, cross the threshold, AP off, land. They claim it's an insurance cost and pax comfort thing, but I thing there's some Asiana, Air France and Colgan pax who would rather see some hand flying skill building.

Classic Fox News "reporting". The headline says he joined up with his captors and was a traitor, but buried in the story they say he made an escape attempt. Well is he really best buddies with them or just earning his captors trust to escape again, and is he really declaring jihad or just saying what he needs to to live a but longer? My god that is one of the worst pieces of journalism I have ever seen.